Pavel Petrenko
In 2014, when Pavlo Petrenko first headed the post-revolutionary Ministry of Justice, he was called one of the most progressive members of Yatsenyuk’s Cabinet. The “young and talented” was entrusted with a grandiose mission – to clean up the judicial system, conduct lustration, and fight corruption. Over the past two years, it has become clear that such a description was greatly exaggerated. Petrenko works superbly for Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s “pocket”, but completely ignores the set goals – to carry out systemic reforms. And this is not surprising, the newly-minted minister is Senya’s “pocket” protégé, a member of the Chernivtsi “Family”, and also an official hryvnia millionaire.
Young clan
Pavel Dmitrievich Petrenko was born on July 17, 1979 in Chernivtsi. Little is known about his family: his biography only mentions his mother and sister Oksana.
Petrenko studied at Chernivtsi Secondary School No. 9 with advanced English language studies (Chernivtsi Gymnasium No. 4). At some point, Pavlik became friends with the guys from the school who were 5 years older – Senya Yatsenyuk and the brothers Maksimka and Lesha Burbak (Read more in the article by Maksym Burbak: How Chernivtsi residents sat on Donetsk’s “golden toilet” ). Personalities are well-known in Ukraine today. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, as the main ringleader and entrepreneur, united everyone under his wing. Later, it was he who would lead school friends to the “Front of Change” and big politics.
In 1996, Petrenko graduated from school with a gold medal. Under the guidance of Arseniy Petrovich, the trio at different times entered the Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University to major in law. In 2001, Pavlo Petrenko received a red diploma. The dean’s office of the law faculty offered him to go to graduate school, but Petrenko, following the call of his heart and Yatsenyuk, moved to Kyiv.
“YOUAREA JURIST”
In the capital, Petrenko started a private practice, providing legal assistance to various firms. After several months of work in Kyiv, he received the post of chief legal adviser to the state-owned Oschadbank, where he worked for almost the entire 2001.
Despite the opening prospects in the civil service, Pavel Dmitrievich decided to build a career in business that same year. Together with partners – Vladimir Gnatyshyn and Sergey Stasyuk – he founded the law firm Justicia Service in Chernivtsi. Its business went up, and Petrenko returned to live in the capital again. By the way, new appointments in the bank were already waiting for him here – he headed the Department of Legal Support of Oschadbank. Pavel Dmitrievich held on to the civil service until 2005.
All this time Pavel Petrenko does not sit in the bank office, but makes new acquaintances. For example, he finds a new partner – Alexander Ageyev, with whom he establishes the law firm “Declarant”. Over time, another company appears – “Advocate Group MLGroup”. In 2006, Petrenko contributed 800 thousand hryvnia to its authorized capital. He was listed as the sole founder, and a certain Yaroslav Bondarenko was registered as the director, although in fact Ageyev was the director. An interesting story is connected with the address of the company “MLGroup”. Officially, according to the register of individuals and legal entities, it was located at the address of Kyiv, Chokolovsky Boulevard, 19. In fact, there was and is a nine-story residential building there. But in the database of the Agency for the Development of the Infrastructure of the Stock Market of Ukraine, an identical company is “registered” at Olesya Gonchara Street, 57b. By the way, the company sometimes changed its name to Stolichnaya Yuridicheskaya Gruppa CJSC and “moved” to 7 Smilyanskaya Street.
In 2008, Oksana Petrenko, Pavel Dmitrievich’s sister, was appointed a member of the Supervisory Board of MLGroup. He left for the post of Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board, thus stepping down and keeping only 49% of the shares. The controlling stake went to an unknown person. By a strange coincidence, these changes coincided with the time when Alexander Ageyev shared with Pavel Petrenko a share (30%) in the transport and forwarding company Zammler Ukraine, whose income in 2007 exceeded 13 million UAH, and Oksana Petrenko became an auditor. Zammler Ukraine was going to open a customs and logistics complex in the Kyiv region. Ageyev did not have any land. A 2.5 hectare plot for construction in Bila Tserkva was owned by Pavel Dmitrievich, as well as Viktor Shevchenko and Oleg Rachov, who became shareholders. In 2008, the customs complex in Bila Tserkva was finally opened. By the way, the firm “Zammler Ukraine” is located at the already known address – Olesya Gonchara Street, 57b. So it can be assumed that “MLGroup” and “Zammler Ukraine” are connected. Lawyers, after all.
According to official information, MLGroup closed in September 2010. The strangest thing is that in 2012, 25% of the company’s shares were owned by an unknown individual. Now the company has been re-registered to the Virgin Islands firms Aidar Limited and Pod Investment Global. Zammler Ukraine is still operating. It is also owned by offshore companies – Zammler Holding Limited (owned by Cypriot Elena Ioannou) and the already mentioned Aidar Limited and Pod Investment Global. The ultimate owners of Aidar Limited and Pod Investment Global are Australian lawyers Ian Taylor and Rachel Amy, specialists in creating offshore companies. Their names are associated with the raider attack on the TVi television channel, as well as with the sale of Ukrainian weapons to South Sudan at reduced prices from the company S-profit Ltd.
Big politics
In 2009, Petrenko, at the invitation of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, joined the Front of Change and oversaw the party’s legal direction – he was the head of the legal department.
In 2010, during the presidential campaign, he provided legal assistance to Arseniy Petrovich, who was a candidate for President. In the autumn of the same year, Petrenko was elected as a deputy of the Kyiv Regional Council on the list of the “Front of Change”. He became a member of the standing commission on legality, law and order and the fight against corruption.
In the 2012 parliamentary elections, he was elected as a people’s deputy from the All-Ukrainian Union “Batkivshchyna” (No. 52 on the electoral list). As usual, he is again responsible for legal issues in the faction.
In 2013, after the merger of the Front of Change and Batkivshchyna, Petrenko became one of the deputy leaders of Batkivshchyna.
It is worth noting that Pavel Dmitrievich has not been involved in scandals throughout his political career and has always maintained neutrality – in fact, his education obliges him to. Only in 2013 did he find himself drawn into a confrontation between Tatyana Bakhteeva Read more about her in the article Tatyana Bakhteeva: “cured”!a People’s Deputy from the Party of Regions, former Chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Healthcare, and Raisa Bogatyreva, the Minister of Healthcare. The ladies began to conflict over the distribution of spheres of influence: Bakhteyeva did not want to share her connections and income in the pharmaceutical business with Bogatyreva. And then, unexpectedly, People’s Deputies from Batkivshchyna Anatoliy Dyriv and Pavlo Petrenko joined the conflict.
They joined the so-called Temporary Investigative Committee of the Verkhovna Rada to investigate abuses in the Ministry of Health, the creation of which was initiated by Tatyana Bakhteyeva. This was preceded by a scandal with the alleged “children who died from vaccines.” It was an order: until the end of the campaign, no one named a single one of the 11 children who allegedly died from vaccines. The people’s representatives needed to figure out what was really going on in the ministry and in healthcare in general, and based on the results, to present a report. Over six months, the commission met four times. It is clear that no one wrote a report. Petrenko received the finished text on a flash drive from the assistant of deputy Tatyana Bakhteyeva. The report contained one interesting point. For some reason, the text ends with a call to give more powers to the State Service of Ukraine for Medicines. This is all the more surprising, because no one authorized the Temporary Commission to draw such conclusions that do not coincide with the topic of abuses and corruption in the Ministry of Health. However, this is understandable, since the deputy head of the State Service for Medicines, Inna Demchenko, was Tatyana Bakhteeva’s person.
Petrenko made another attack on Bogatyreva when he criticized the allegedly billion-dollar tender of the Health Ministry for the purchase of ambulances. In this case, Pavel Dmitrievich’s interest is understandable, he wanted to push his companies into the competitive bidding of the tender and receive part of the funds from the state treasury.
Maidan changed everything in Pavel Petrenko’s life.
Pavel Petrenko at Euromaidan
In early December 2013, he headed the National Resistance Headquarters and began providing legal assistance to students who had been dealt with by Berkut. The politician opened his own office, where he consulted the victims. Pavel Dmitrievich spoke at a session of the Shevchenkivskyi District Court in Kyiv, where 60 cases against Euromaidan activists were being considered. He co-authored a bill to exempt participants in mass protests from criminal prosecution and promised to close criminal cases brought against students.
When the confrontations on Maidan began, Pavel Dmitrievich was at the forefront in terms of activity and loud statements. He even said that a good half of the protesters had his number written down as “Pasha the lawyer”.
In the Ministry of Justice team
On February 27, 2014, Pavlo Dmitrievich was elected to the post of Minister of Justice in the government of Arseniy Yatsenyuk. His candidacy was proposed by representatives of Automaidan. True, not without persistent lobbying by Yatsenyuk. Petrenko was approved unanimously.
Pavel Dmitrievich promised to take Euromaidan people with him to the team of the “new ministerial government”. Pavlenko kept his word – people from Maidan came to the government, but how professional are these people? “Outstanding” personalities of the minister’s team:
– Agia AkhundovaFirst Deputy Chairman of the State Executive Service of Ukraine. In 2003, she provided intimate services to men in the Donetsk region. A criminal case was opened against her for prostitution and pimping, but it was closed after 3 years. She worked for about a year. She was a secretary and then a mistress of the head of the Pechersk court. She is connected with the Azerbaijani mafia, controlled the criminal “Ayzerov” pub “Baku Boulevard”.
– Inna ZavalnayaFirst Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian State Register, public activist. Responsible for making the decision to register the political party “Right Sector”. Worked for less than six months.
– Deputies from Petrenko’s company “MLGroup”. This is Anton Yanchuk (still holds the position) and the head of the State Registration Service Anna Onishchenko (she worked there for less than a year). Before Onishchenko, a person associated with both MLGroup and the People’s Front, Oksana Ivanchenko, also worked as Petrenko’s deputy. By the way, many people call the Ministry of Justice MLust or a branch of the law firm MLGroup.
– Sergey Shklyaranother deputy of Petrenko, worked in the now famous “forge of legal personnel” – the company “Arzinger”. This is the very structure that is associated with the machinations with “Kurchenko’s fuel” and work for “Rosneft”.
– Natalia Sevostyanovathe first deputy minister of justice, worked at the National University “Odessa Law Academy”, whose president is the disgraced ex-MP, chairman of the High Council of Justice of Ukraine Sergei Kivalov (Read more about him in the article Sergey Kivalov. Godfather of Corruption and Justice). She was an assistant to the people’s deputy Mustafa Dzhemilev (Read more about him in the article Mustafa Dzhemilev. The Dark Tatar Past of a Bright Fighter Against Regimes). It still works.
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The image of Petrenko and his “honest” team suffered greatly when in 2015 one of his subordinates, the deputy head of the registration service of the Main Justice Department in Kyiv, Oleksandr Lypovyi, was detained while accepting a bribe of 70 thousand hryvnias for registration of ownership of a 700 square meter premises. The official was dismissed under the Law “On the Purification of Power” at the end of 2014 from the Ukrainian State Register. Pavel Dmitrievich immediately announced that he had dismissed Lypovyi, but he was reinstated in his position by a court decision.
Petrenko, of course, announced competitions for vacant positions in the Ministry. But this is nothing more than a PR stunt. Similar versions of “competitions” were held in the Ministry of Justice before. The “right” person who scored more points always won. In addition, Pavel Dmitrievich appointed whoever he wanted to the positions. A striking example of a brilliant personnel policy is the appointment of 28-year-old Alexey Zaytsev as a deputy who oversaw the direction of the state executive service in Kharkov. There are no special professional achievements in this person’s track record. In December 2014, he became a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice immediately as an assistant to the minister, and then transferred to Kharkov.
In general, any Minister of Justice always faces a choice: to defeat corruption or to lead it. It is not for us to judge what Petrenko chose, but the following fact speaks for itself.
Almost immediately after his appointment, Pavel Dmitrievich was noticed in one of the capital’s fashionable establishments, “Safe”.
The photo was taken on the mobile phone of lawyer and Kharkiv City Council deputy Anatoly Rodzinsky. The newly-minted minister was dining in the company of blonde Natalia Sevostyanova, his first deputy and lover, an unknown brunette of about 20 years old, and egg magnate and multimillionaire Oleg Bakhmatyuk. He is the owner of the Ukrlandfarming holding and the Avangard agricultural holding, one of the largest egg producers in Ukraine. The identity of the oligarch became known in 2007 during the conflict around six regional gas companies that he owned with the Boyko-Firtash group (read about them in the articles YURIY BOYKO – “UNTOUCHABLE” and DMYTRO FIRTASH. THE STORY OF THE TERNOPIL BILLIONAIRE ). The latter forced Bakhmatyuk out of the energy market, and he went to the “agrarians”. An informal meeting with one of the richest people in Ukraine shocked the public. Although this is not strange. It has long been rumored that Bakhmatyuk has problems in the holding “Ukrlandfarming”. He had to repay a loan of 600 million dollars, which he took in 2011 from Sberbank of Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). The money was not paid, so the bank could at any time take all the real estate of the holding pledged to it, even without court decisions. The only thing that could prevent this was the “position” of the state registration service, controlled by the Ministry of Justice. So the meeting was quite businesslike.
On December 2, 2014, the Verkhovna Rada approved the new composition of the Cabinet of Ministers, in which Petrenko retained the post of Minister of Justice.
On April 14, 2016, the parliament dismissed Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, supporting the candidacy of Volodymyr Groysman in his place (Read more about him in the article Volodymyr Groysman. Dark spots in the biography of the Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada). On the same day, the Rada approved the new composition of the Cabinet of Ministers, in which Petrenko again took the post of head of the Ministry of Justice.
How the Minister got burned
It is no secret that working for the Ministry of Justice is a profitable business. And this is not due to high salaries, but to the fact that all raider takeovers, land divisions, tenders being plundered, and the promised full lustration take place under the patronage of the structure.
Selling confiscated goods via the Internet. This idea had been flying around the Ministry of Justice for over 2 years, but Petrenko, having created SETAM – an electronic trading system, decided to appropriate all the laurels for himself. It would seem that the innovation would bring a lot of money to the state, but Petrenko managed to make money even here. He monopolized the state program. It is difficult to do, but for a lawyer, nothing is impossible. A little history. At the beginning of 2013, the arrested property was sold by 4 organizations selected by the Ministry of Justice, by the end of the year only one remained – ChP “NIVA V.Sh.”. Petrenko marked his arrival by holding a tender, the results of which he was in no hurry to announce. It turned out to be simple – the tender was won by firms directly associated with the new Minister of Justice.
The first winning company, Lik Torg, is registered to a certain Alexander Borisyuk and is registered at the same address as the law firm MLGroup. Previously, it had a different name, Aktsioner (owner – Oleg Stepanenko, director – Oleg Yelchik). These are Petrenko’s partners in the company Megapolis Capital. Moreover, the company should not have participated in the tender at all, since it declared the absence of fixed assets and zero profit in 2013. The second winner is the company Capital Price. This is the reincarnation of the previous main trader of confiscated property – SP Justicia. The companies had the same addresses. Also with the right to sign in Capital Price was Yevgeny Mashkin, one of the former founders of Justicia, which was eliminated in 2013 for violations. In addition to the above-mentioned companies, Avista and Ruby Integration won the tender.
Logically, the new Ministry of Justice should have allowed all willing companies to sell confiscated goods. However, the agency decided to monopolize the sales process through the state enterprise Informjust, which it controlled, for 5% of the cost. Previously, such a service from private traders “cost” 15%. In fact, out of the 15% of the trader’s remuneration, 10% went to the Yanukovych Family, 5% remained with the Ministry of Justice, and the trader, at best, got 1%. Since the Family is no longer there, the financial condition of the Ministry of Justice did not suffer. In addition, the innovation instantly made it possible to control all financial flows from the sale of confiscated goods and forget about “kickbacks”. However, there was a nuance in the whole scheme – Petrenko, it would seem, had established his “business”, it is not difficult to transfer money from a state enterprise to private pockets, but if he left office, he would lose the “feeding trough”. But Pyotr Dmitrievich finds a way out – to transfer money to a private company for services for storing confiscated goods. And in this case, it was not possible to do without an “honest” tender. It was held in 3 days and they chose Alfa Khimtrade LLC with an authorized capital of 5 thousand hryvnias, which had never been engaged in such activities. Moreover, it was assumed that the company would store property worth billions of hryvnias for 3% of its value from those 5% of the cost of Informjust’s services. It is difficult to imagine a more ingenious scheme. However, under pressure from journalists and the public, Petrenko had to refuse the services of Alfa Khimtrade LLC and transfer the right to choose a custodian to ordinary state executors.
And the most important thing is the numbers: in 2013, without SETAM, the enforcement service sold seized property for 1.115 billion hryvnia, and in 2014 – only for 393 million hryvnia.
Tenders. The most common and effective scheme for obtaining money is government procurement. It was and will be. The tender is won by “their” people, who set inflated prices. The difference is divided between officials and businessmen. Petrenko successfully wedged himself into the well-trodden scheme of “predecessors”. A striking example: last year’s scam by the Ministry of Internal Affairs with the purchase of Renault Dokker and Renault Duster for police cars, which are significantly inferior to the Toyota Prius. Only this acquisition is not accidental.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs held a tender. It was won by a certain LLC Niko Prime Megapolis. The total amount of the deal was 122.52 million hryvnia. Everything would be fine, but the founders of the company are LLC Asset Management Company Kovin Capital and LLC Niko Auto Holding (Ukraine), the nominal beneficiaries are Cypriots Katya Apostolou and Ioannis Elia. These same people own Niko Auto Holding (Ukraine). Among the founders of the company are Viven Management S.A. and AMC Kovin Capital, registered to Pavel Petrenko’s old partner Vladimir Gnatyshyn, with whom they opened their first law firm Justicia Service in Chernivtsi, and the British IFL International Finance and Leasing Limited. Can it be called a coincidence that, according to the terms of the competition, the firm of a friend and colleague of the Minister of Justice won? Of course not.
And the most important achievement of 2016 is that on August 1, Ukraine completed the full transition to electronic public procurement through the ProZorro system. This means that from now on, all tenders that exceed threshold values (up to 200 thousand hryvnia for goods and services, up to 1.5 million hryvnia for work) must be conducted through the new system.
The customer must upload tender applications to ProZorro, thus announcing the purchase. After the winner is determined, the results are uploaded to the system. Note that the Ministry of Justice tested the system for 2 years.
Liquidation of government services. In January 2015, the Cabinet of Ministers, at the instigation of the Ministry of Justice, liquidated the State Registration Service (Ukrgosreestr) and the State Executive Service. The powers were transferred to the Ministry of Justice. Thus, the corruption schemes on which state registrars of real estate, business, and civil status acts earn money have not gone away. They are simply now directly subordinate to the Ministry of Justice.
Construction matters. In 2015, the Kyiv City Council decided to leave the right of Niko Invest LLC to lease a plot of land at 151-b Mykola Bazhan Street, and also gave the company the right to build a housing and public complex. Despite the fact that there were many violations. The story dates back to 2004. The Kyiv City Council signed a lease agreement for 2.24 hectares of land in the center of the capital with a little-known Niko Invest LLC for 25 years. The plot was then valued at UAH 50 million. The company was supposed to complete the construction within 5 years. In 2014, the Kyiv City State Administration Department of Land Resources found out that there was no building there. They wanted to terminate the agreement with the LLC, but it was not to be. All courts confirmed the legality of the lease, citing the decision of the Kyiv Commercial Court dated August 3, 2009. Then the odious judge Lyubomyr Golovatyuk (assistance in the privatization of Mezhyhirya) cancelled the lease term and the possibility to terminate the agreement. Thus, the lease agreement of Niko Invest became essentially non-cancellable. The reason for such “favor” is the closeness of the company’s founders to the Minister of Justice. The owners of Niko Invest are the Cypriot company Niko Holding and Investment Limited and LLC AMC Kovin Capital. The latter belongs to Vladimir Gnatyshyn.
Lustration is not for everyone. The main slogan of Petrenko’s activities is complete lustration. He even said that judges are afraid of his “guiding hand” and 200 people are resigning every day throughout Ukraine. Only it turned out that all-encompassing lustration can be avoided. In March 2015, Deputy Head of the Main Directorate of the State Fiscal Service in Kiev Anna Ignatenko appealed to the Ministry of Justice with a request to clarify some provisions of the law “On the purification of power”. It turned out to be a kind of “lustration indulgence” signed by the First Deputy Minister of Justice Natalia Sevostyanova, that she (Ignatenko) is not subject to lustration and should not be fired. Petrenko said that this was a falsification and the ministry did not send any letters. Everyone believed it.
Help for Yanukovych and Co.. It would seem that the new government from Maidan should direct its work to ensure that the “criminal” government of Yanukovych and the Family is punished. However, it is clear that the Chernovitskys have taken advantage of the Donetsks’ well-established schemes. Their own do not abandon their own, and the Ministry of Justice will even help.
In March 2014, the EU Council froze the assets of 18 Ukrainian officials suspected of embezzling the budget and involvement in the murders of activists on the Maidan. A few months later, former President Yanukovych and his sons, Pshonka (Read more about him in the article Viktor Pshonka: the rise and fall of the prosecutor’s Caesar), Klyuev brothers and young oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko have filed lawsuits in European courts against the EU’s decision to impose sanctions against them. They are to be considered by the EU General Court and the European Court of Justice in cases against the Council of the EU.
What is the Ministry of Justice doing under Petrenko’s leadership?
Pavel Dmitrievich, without consulting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had the opposite position, decided to introduce Ukraine as a third party in the process of appealing the sanctions. And this plays into the hands of Yanukovych and Co., allowing them to unfreeze their assets, give a little to the new government and transfer the rest to offshores. In September 2014, the Ministry of Justice issued a power of attorney to represent Ukraine’s interests in European courts to Maitra Kamilla Mekhtiyeva, a member of the Paris Bar Association. The most interesting thing is that the European specialist agreed to work for free.
Two months later, the Ministry of Justice changed its mind – Ukraine refused to participate in the process. But during this time, Viktor Yanukovych’s lawyer Joseph Hague managed to appeal Ukraine’s actions. In March 2015, the former president filed a motion for reimbursement of the costs he incurred in connection with the appeal procedure. The court granted the motion. Yanukovych should be returned 57,317 pounds sterling (70 thousand dollars) from the Ukrainian budget. This was reported by the former Minister of Justice of Ukraine Elena Lukash. Meanwhile, the achievements in the legal proceedings against the Yanukovych family are more than modest – only 8 thousand hryvnias have been returned in two years.
Raider takeoversAt the end of 2015, two raider scandals broke out, which became among the top egregious cases of lawlessness of the new government.
In November 2015, about 400 unknown people illegally entered the territory of the Zhitomir confectionery factory “ZhL”. They wanted to seize the building, a fight broke out, grenades were used. It looks like the plot of an action movie. But the Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov (Read more about him in the article Arsen Avakov: the criminal past of the Minister of Internal Affairs) and his supporters classify the incident as a common violation of public order. It is not surprising, because Avakov is a member of the People’s Front party, and the main customer and leader of the raider takeover was named his fellow party member, MP Serhiy Pashynsky. Pashynsky’s business partner Serhiy Tishchenko called the owner of the factory, American investor Igor Boyko, many times and demanded a “tribute” of 10 million dollars for “peace.” Boyko refused. Then the state machine began to work. First of all, the Ministry of Justice and Pavel Petrenko. The Ministry of Justice excluded the enterprise from the State Register of Legal Entities and arbitrarily “appointed” a new director. Then Avakov got involved – he provided assistance to the raiders in the form of security for the factory. Local authorities turned a blind eye to everything, despite the loss of 100 million hryvnia in taxes per year. And Petro Poroshenko decided to simply not interfere – one competitor less.
The name of Pavlo Petrenko suddenly surfaced, and when the Ukrainian National Lottery was raided. The scheme was repeated. UNL General Director Andriy Bochkovskyi learned via the Internet that someone (Who – the Ministry of Justice under the leadership of Petrenko and the Chairman of the Registration Service Department of the Ministry Serhiy Benedysiuk) made changes to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities and Individual Entrepreneurs. According to it, a certain Swiss citizen Peter Rudolf Shetty was registered as the new owner, and the company already had new managers. The said changes were made on the basis of the decision of the Royal District Court of Zhitomir
The court’s decision is overturned with great difficulty, but the registration service continues to play on the raiders’ side, trying to re-register the corporate rights of the legal owner of UNL to a new one. The Ministry of Justice assists in this.
E-declaration. The recent scandal that Pavel Dmitrievich is involved in is the methodical disruption of the electronic declaration system, which was launched on August 15, 2016, without a certificate of conformity. The heads of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Pavel Petrenko and Arsen Avakov, categorically refused to submit their data. Of course, the system is not perfect, but the government is “young”. But there is another side – corruption, which is connected with the struggle for the monopoly of companies engaged in servicing the software of state registers. They report to a certain Oleg Klimenkov. A search engine for the request “Oleg Klimenkov” gives this person as a “freelance adviser to First Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Turchynov” (Turchynov held the post in 2009, more about him in the article Oleksandr Turchynov. Skeletons in the closet of the “bloody pastor” of Ukraine) and General Director of the Center for Information and Computer Technologies LLC.
So, in Ukraine, the company Enter-com is engaged in servicing the software for state registries. It works under a contract that expires at the end of 2016. It was registered with a residence permit in an apartment in a residential building in 2009, shortly before the tender. Oleg Klimenkov lobbied for the company’s interests. He has a partnership agreement for software with the Russian company Letograf. Document flow in government agencies in the CIS countries is built on this system. In essence, Enter-com, as well as state registries and gigabytes of confidential information on Ukrainian politicians, are under Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism)’s thumb. So it is clear that Klimenkov and his company are given the green light. In this whole story, the corruption thread leads to former Prime Minister Yatsenyuk. Because the most logical thing for the new prime minister is to remove the suspicious company from the flow of state registries. Nothing has changed after Yatsenyuk’s resignation in April 2016 – the structure is allowed to work. The embrasure is held by Senya’s associates who remained in the Cabinet after the spring government rotation – Petrenko and Avakov. Moreover, in a strange way, the company “Enter-com” received a multi-million contract, having won a tender, to ensure the operation of the registers under the new Minister of Justice. No one checked the information about the origin of the software from this company.
The Minister’s “Weaknesses”
Hryvnia millionaire. If Ukrainians are barely making ends meet, then during the crisis Petrenko’s income increased 6 times. His fortune in 2013 was 3.8 million hryvnia ($146 thousand), and already in 2015 – 24 million hryvnia ($926 thousand). Pavel Dmitrievich explained such rapid enrichment by inflation, i.e. the increase in the dollar exchange rate.
Petrenko officially became a hryvnia millionaire in 2012, declaring 1.6 million hryvnia. The peak of his purchasing power came in 2013. Then the official purchased a land plot of 748 square meters for 141 thousand hryvnia; a new apartment for 968 thousand hryvnia, and a 2006 Land Rover for 980 thousand. The total purchase amounted to more than 2 million hryvnia.
Apartment for a mistress“Personal life is not an obstacle to work,” Pavel Petrenko believes. The minister is in a romantic relationship with his first deputy, Natalia Sevostyanova.
They rent one apartment, this is stated in the politicians’ declarations. In the declaration for 2014, Pavel Dmitrievich indicated that he spent 255 thousand hryvnia on renting 144 square meters of elite housing; there is no such information in the expenses for 2015. An apartment of the same square footage is also indicated in Sevostyanova’s declaration.
The nuance of the relationship between Petrenko and Sevostyanova is that the new anti-corruption legislation prohibits relatives from working while being subordinate to each other. So the politician violates this norm of the law with his civil marriage. A stamp in his passport would have saved Petrenko. But there is an even bigger “but” – you cannot transfer to your official wife everything that can be transferred to your civil wife – real estate, expensive cars and other property.
Pavel Dmitrievich also owns two plots of land. The land with an area of 15 acres is located in the village of Noviye Petrovtsy. Petrenko’s dacha neighbor is Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Shoes on sale. Pavel Petrenko completely ignores the dress code, but loves expensive things that often seem unfashionable. For example, the shoes, worn by life, turned out to be a brand model of the Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta. However, it is very difficult to buy them. This is a 2008 collection. The original cost of the shoes was $810 or about 20 thousand UAH at the current exchange rate. Now the model can be found on online flea markets with a 60% discount.
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In general, the current Minister of Justice is neither a “minister” nor a “justice minister”. A simple “fixer” for small clients, a “little flunky” for the powerful and a “henpecked husband” for women. And what could one expect from a “minister” born of Yatseuk and Euromaidan?
Arina Dmitrieva, for SKELET-info
